I asked it, as I had a conversation in recent days with a fellow from a large corporate. Customer-centricity was recently adopted as an internal mantra, but the manifestation of that was…wait for it…sentiment analysis.

It’s a start, right? But is it really a difference-maker?

I’ve written recently about jobs-to-be-done. As in, what customers hire your product to do. Those jobs have a tendency to (i) be hidden from you; and (ii) change over time. Knowing, and acting on, jobs-to-be-done (JTBD acronymized) is probably one of the most customer-centric things a company can do. You’re getting deep into what someone is buying your product for.

While I don’t work for a large corporate, I am integrating jobs-to-be-done in some work on next generation gamification elements for the Spigit platform. Why? Because there are many different types of game mechanics that can be applied to a platform. But why would you add any of them? To better deliver on what your customers hire you to do. To accomplish this, I’m using the Listhings site – online post-it notes – to collect and socialize these. I follow my own format for JTBD: context, job, success metric. An actual (blurred-out) example is below:

You know what? Customers love talking about their jobs-to-be-done. Seriously. I usually schedule an inital hour to talk about them, and every single company has wanted to continue to the conversation for another hour. The conversations are not just good customer relations, which they are. They are leading to areas where the Spigit platform can apply game mechanics to improve their outcomes.

Where would JTBD fit?

Which got me thinking. What exactly are companies doing today, at least in the product and service development arena? Where would customer jobs-to-be-done fit with existing approaches? The graphic below is my take on what’s happening out there:

The center blue area represents the work of ideating, designing and producing products and services. The top grey boxes floating around up there? Those are the current factors influencing the product/service development process.

Market Analysis: Classic input for product development here. What are the trends? What are competitors doing? What’s going on in adjacent markets? You’re got to do this. It’s a source of ideas, and evidence of what customers are gravitating toward.

Executive Fiat: Does this really happen??? Heh, just joking of course. This will be a reality forever, and it’s actually appropriate in mild doses. The thing to watch is the bull-in-the-china-shop approach, where that product is gonna get done, I’m not listening to anyone! Perhaps too many executives subscribe to the Steve Jobs-attributed notion that customers don’t know what they want (“So I’m going to give it to them!”).

Usage Vectors: Once you have product out there, you learn what people are using, what they value in the existing product features. And you continue to develop along those vectors. It’d be irresponsible to do otherwise. Just watch getting stuck on those vectors and missing the market shifts.

Customer Service Tickets: As people use your product, they’re going to file requests and report issues. These items are some clues to what people are trying to get done. They suffer from being narrow, focused on a specific interaction point and grounded in what they know of the current product. But you can divine some of what people want to get done from these.

Customer Surveys: Surveys get you closer to customers. Polling people’s preferences for difference attributes and behaviors. Good input as you consider a product or venture. Problem with surveys is that the questions are set ahead of time. Whoever puts them together has to decide what the key factors are. But that leaves a huge hole in understanding what customers themselves value.

Focus Groups: A favorite activity of large companies is to get some random people in a room for a couple hours and ask them about some concept being tested. In that these sessions have actual people talking, they are nominally useful. But common critiques of these are that

Participants tell researchers what they want to hear

The format is unnatural – forced face-to-face interactions with strangers for two hours in a closed room

Alpha personalities sway things

What’s discussed are already-decided concepts, not insight on what customers are looking to get done

As was stated in this 2003 Slate article, “The primary function of focus groups is often to validate the sellers’ own beliefs about their product.”

Jobs-to-be-done fills a gap

In all of the popular bases for developing products and services, one can see a gap. Most are a triangulation to understanding what customers want. Now some are quite useful in a customer-centric sense: usage vectors, customer service tickets, surveys. But they’re also piecemeal.

They represent the hope that you’ve got a bead on customer needs and wants.

Why the reluctance to actually talk directly with customers? Seems plain talk in a (not overly) structured way will give you a better sense of where opportunities lie. Aside from the product/service tools listed above, there are the social media engagement practices of today (react to tweets, have a Facebook page, sentiment analysis). All have their place, but they fall short.

Hutch, you are correct. Your approach is sort of radical. However, when all is said and done about the need for firms to be customer-centric … generally more is said than done and radical approaches are useful.

My experience is that elicitation … a conversation with a customer about the job-to-be-done … is the most productive tool for market analysis in the front end of new product development. It also helps tone down ineffective decisions made by executive fiat and usage vectors. http://goo.gl/AmNNE

Elicitation fits into the following range of primary marketing research tools.

Surveying — surveyor asks closed-ended questions that can be answered in a few words.
Interviewing —interviewer clearly keeps control of the interview.
Elicitation — elicitor controls the conversation without revealing the agenda to the respondent.
Conversation — two people talk and exchange information freely and unplanned.

This is especially true when considering elicitation as a primary research tool for the job-to-be-done. Below are three reasons corporate employees do not use elicitation more often.

1. Elicitation sounds exciting (and it is) but it is also just hard work. A seasoned elicitor gathers and analyzes data and information from many conversations with customers, end users, and competitors.

2. Customers are seldom happy when you discount their knowledge and probe for job-to-be-done knowledge in conversations with their end users. (I am sometimes surprised about how little some of my clients’ customers understand about their customers’ job-to-be-done.)

3. Corporate employees cannot pick up the phone and elicit sensitive data and information from an employee of a competitor.

I’d add one thing to asking customers about their jobs, which in truth, they can only half express, especially if they haven’t imagined or don’t believe there is solution for what they really want to do. That is, go out and visit the customers, watch them work for a few hours, ask why they do things the way they do and observe broken processes and workarounds. The truest expression of behavior and of needs is what people do, not what they say.

Still, this is a minor quibble/addition to some good insight.

What I find troubling is when execs believe they know better and don’t want to be confused with the facts. This is not the same thing as Steve Jobs stating “customers don’t know what they want”. Actually, Steve was correct in that customers often sublimate what’s wrong with the way they do things now, and aren’t aware of their workarounds. But, he and his team were very keen observers of behavior, which is why they got the needs and designs right. But many senior execs are convinced, even when they don’t talk to or visit customers, that their ideas about what needs to be done and how it should be done are better.

You’d think what you document here would be intuitively obvious. How could you possibly design a solution to a problem if you don’t really know what the problem is? But, we still have a long way to go.

Great thread….let’s build on it. Thinkdisruptive touches on the deeper understanding of “why”. Knowing the JTBD may help decide what to build but knowing the motivation(s) behind it can greatly influence design and is essential for marketing, sales, and service.